Goodbye Google – Three Years of Memories.

Today was my last day working at Google in London! It’s been over three years since my first day, and words can’t really describe how grateful I am for the experience to spend three years working at Google. I don’t really speak much about work on my blog, it’s something I keep relatively private, but I really wanted to just share some of my favourite memories and photos on here from my time there, and explain why I’m leaving. When I told my friends I was leaving they were all shocked, and I’ve been asked so many times ‘why on earth would you leave Google?!’, so I thought I’d better explain myself, haha!

Why I’m Leaving

The majority of my three years there were pretty dreamy and amazing. I loved the food and perks, the offices (I was lucky enough to visit the Google offices in Chicago, Dubai, and Sydney, as well as working each day in their London CSG office), the people, the work, and the flexibility and freedom to choose my own hours. It was my first experience of working for a company focused on your output rather than the amount of time you spent sat at your desk, and it’s something I really want to take with me going forwards as I found I was just so much more productive and efficient with my time. For most of the past three years I kept saying I wouldn’t leave unless they forced me, so to be leaving off my own accord is a weird and bittersweet feeling.

However, the past year and a half has been really tough. We started working from home around the beginnning-middle of March in 2020, and it hasn’t been a secret that I’ve really struggled with working from home. And the thing is, without the extra in-office benefits, working at Google became just like working for any other company. There was also a lot of change over the past year with my team and products that I worked on – my favourite product was handed over to a different team and I started working on a product I just wasn’t as passionate about, and I began to feel really unchallenged.

There was also a lot of confusion around when we would return to the office, and so I was constantly wondering when we could go back in and return to a bit of normality. I know that some people love working from home, but I honestly can’t stand it. I miss the social aspect, and I miss having meetings in person – I find video calls exhausting and completely draining. I miss having a desk and a separation between work and home. My back is a mess and I now also have tennis elbow (which is horrifically painful) from having to work on the sofa because I don’t have a dedicated work space – as you likely know, I bought my house back in February but I’m currently renovating it so it’s all a bit chaotic. I don’t even have a dining table or space for a dining table until more rooms are finished!

I decided I’d just stick it out until the end of the year and then see how I felt. But then an opportunity came up unexpectedly and I just couldn’t say no. I’m an ambitious person and it’s an opportunity in a media agency to advance my career in ways I just couldn’t at Google. The team I was in at Google was super small (5x people), whereas at my new company I’ll be managing a team of fifteen. I’ve also really missed working for a media agency! I miss the vibrancy, the workplace socials and the variety of clients to make each day interesting. In our industry it’s always seen as the ‘end-goal’ to move out of agency life and into client-side or brand-side, and all I will say is, ‘the grass isn’t always greener’. However, if you ever get the chance to work at Google, DO IT. The experience you will get is like nothing else and I do have really fond memories of my time there!

It was an epic experience and something I’ll be forever grateful for, and I’ll always have all of those good memories, but now is the right time for me to go. A new challenge and a new opportunity and something that truly uses all of the skills I’ve spent the past almost ten years building. Anyway, without further ado, here are some of my favourite photos and memories from my 3+ years at Google in London…

The London Office

I adored the London office. I worked in CSG and actually preferred it to the Kings Cross one. It was funky and different, there were little nooks and hangout spaces, a gym on the 9th floor with views across London, a ‘Techstop’ where you could drop in and chat to the Google tech experts about any computer or phone issues and they would sort it for you, and whenever I needed time away from the noise and hustle and bustle of the office I would retreat to the 9th floor library to work in some peace and quiet.

They also had regular talks and interviews in the office – my favourites were with legendary chef Martha Ortiz, Holocaust surviver Zigi Shipper, and journalist Huw Edwards. Additionally, because Google are very dog-friendly, Dylan came to work with me a couple of days and became a ‘Doogler’ for the day!

The Food

My absolute favourite thing about working at the Google CSG office was without a doubt the food! It was honestly insane. We had two restaurants; one Asian restaurant and then a more ‘general/world foods’ restaurant, as well as a cafe manned by baristas. On each floor there was a ‘micro-kitchen’ which was always fully stocked with snacks (literally a wall of snacks) and drinks. All of the food and drink in the office was completely free, and you could have as much as you liked.

They served breakfast and lunch, and if you also wanted dinner there you can grab a salad or sandwich from the micro-kitchens. The quality and level of food was like a luxury hotel buffet x10. We had hot breakfast food and cold breakfast food, a huge amount of fresh fruit and veg, thirteen different types of bread in the morning, a tower of desserts at lunch, edible flowers, and every day the menu changed. One day it could be Greek food with huge salads and melt-in-your-mouth lamb, the next Jamaican food with the most incredible plantain fritters, and the next a roast dinner with huge Yorkshire puddings.

The food team were just incredible, and if you wanted something specific you could just ask and they would try and find it! I once requested hot chocolate in the winter and the next week it was in the micro-kitchens. I also once complained because they served ‘lamingtons’ which weren’t actually lamingtons (obviously having grown up in Australia this was a food that is very close to my heart), and they literally gave me different ‘lamingtons’ every day until I said ‘Yes! This is a lamington!’

And then there was Christmas…MY GOODNESS. At the beginning of December they would serve us a huge Christmas dinner buffet with every Christmas dish imaginable. That day was always my favourite day of the year at work!

They were also really good at accommodating vegans, with an entire vegan section each day, and everything was clearly marked as halal or kosher. I also really loved that over Ramadan, they would leave takeout boxes dotted around so Muslim Googlers could fill a takeout box with food and take it home with them for when they broke their fast. They were also really good at providing ‘celebratory food’, for example for Chinese New Year, Christmas, and on Google’s Birthday (hello cake and ice-cream).

On the bad side, the ‘Google Stone’ is a real thing. I gained 15kg in my first year at Google *cry*.

The Parties

I was pretty lucky to have been to some great work parties before starting at Google, but my first Christmas party there was another level entirely. It was the 2018 party, held at Printworks in London, and it was essentially a huge Christmas food market in one of the warehouses, and then a nightclub in the other warehouse. They also had drag queens, a karaoke room, and plenty of photo opportunities.

My second Christmas party was 2019, it was held in a new warehouse near The O2 in Greenwich, and was ‘Apres Ski’ themed. The warehouse was decked out like an actual mountain ski village with chalets, ski lifts for photo opps, and a giant Yeti wandering around haha. There wasn’t as much food as the previous year, but the entertainment was SO good – Salt ‘n’ Pepa performed, as well as drag queen Cheryl Hole. It was so much fun!

We did also have some really fun team building days, but I’ve decided not to post photos of those as I don’t feel comfortable posting photos of my team. Things we did included bowling, escape rooms, cocktail making, an afternoon tea at The Sanderson hotel (photo below) and also cooking classes at the Kings Cross office!

Other Offices

I loved visiting the other offices. I visited Chicago, Dubai, and Sydney, and really enjoyed seeing how different they were, but at the same time all having that ‘Googley’ vibe.

The Chicago office was unbelievably cool, in a very trendy part of Chicago and the office was full of graffiti, a huge games room, and one of Chicago’s famous trains was perched on the roof terrace and had been turned into a seating/hang-out area. The view of the city skyline was also beautiful! Oh, and they had oreos and Ghirardelli chocolates in the microkitchens!!

The Dubai office was very small, but I loved the little bowls of dates in the kitchens and the cool breakout spaces.

The Sydney offices were my favourite! From memory *I think* they had three different offices in the city? There was a huge modern one similar to Kings Cross, an older one which felt a bit like CSG, and then a very small one above the Australian National Maritime Museum! They had a lot of cool artwork in the offices, a really peaceful nap room which came in very handy when I arrived very early in the morning straight off my flight and couldn’t get into my hotel yet, and really great food (hello TimTams in the MKs!).

Goodbye Google

I went back into the office last week to collect my belongings from my desk and have one last afternoon there, and it was the strangest feeling. The office was deserted, the only person I saw was my boss, and it just didn’t feel normal at all with it being so empty. You have to wear a mask when you’re walking around the office, and all of the food is individually packaged in plastic packaging. I had one last ice-cream from the ice-cream freezer on the 9th floor terrace, and then headed out of the office for the last time.

Leaving for the final time was a weird, bittersweet feeling, but I’m excited for the future and new challenges ahead of me, and I’ll always remember Google as the place that gave me a purpose and showed me empathy when I was deep in grief, a place full of the most brilliant people with some of the most talented minds who gave me an experience I thought I could only dream of. I’ll miss it a lot!

Thank you Google London!